Fading Echoes
by goolcaptain
Summary: Joan Adams died last night as she had lived, in agony. She was 6 years old. None heard her screams, none who cared. Now she lies on the slab at Tru Calling's morgue. Will anyone hear her now?


Summary; Joan Adams died last night as she had lived, in agony. She was six years old. No one heard her screams for help, no one who cared. Now she lies in her body-bag on Davies' autopsy slab in the Boston Morgue. Will anyone hear her now?  
Rating; Very definitely R. No violence, no sex but gore aplenty and implied child-abuse and incest. If you've never actually seen an autopsy this is as close as I can make it without letting you smell the bile. And believe me they're a lot different from the pristine crap you see on CSI etc.  
Show; Tru Calling  
Timeframe; Not relevant  
Distribution; as you like it, more the merrier. I think you'll work out why I wrote this and why I want to share it.  
Disclaimer; all these characters belong to CBS-Fox and not me and this is purely a non-profit fic.  
Feedback; Echoes

It was kid.  
Probably a female.  
She could always tell by the way they handled the body. A big guy, a cadaver that made the coroner's guys sweat, got all the sensitivity of a pile of bricks. An ordinary sized guy was treated like a bag of shopping, gently enough but workaday.  
Women were always given more care. Screw equality. She'd seen it time and time again in both male and female. Guys who shot themselves tended to shoot themselves in the head, their brains spurted out of the top of their skulls looking for all the world like pureed cabbage soaked in tomato ketchup. Tru had seen eyeballs blasted clean out of their sockets by the force of the muzzle blast, able to look up through them and see the soft neon lights of the lab through the fist sized hole smashed in the top of the head.  
Women didn't. Women who shot themselves always shot themselves in the heart. Even in death they couldn't break the social programming they'd received from the moment they'd been wrapped in the pink blanket rather than the blue. Even in death they couldn't bear to mess up their pretty faces.  
This body didn't even fill the dull black plastic bag, looked almost lost in it. It was as though Ramirez could almost tuck it under his arms as though it was a piece of carry-on luggage at the airport. It had to be either a kid or a midget.  
It wasn't a midget.  
Not judging by the way he laid it on the table. Cradling it in his arms then placing the bag down carefully with his hands left deliberately underneath it, almost as though he was lowering his lover down onto their bed. He gently slid them out, the plastic creaking slightly as it settled on the cool stainless steel surface.  
He nodded to Tru then he was gone. No small talk, no wisecrack, no smile. His face a mask of placid calm. His feelings unreachable.  
Definitely a kid. Probably a girl.  
"Ok lets get started" Davies was all business. He and Tru donned their gear. Facemasks, hairnets, gloves, clear plastic aprons that always reminded her of the deli counter people down at the supermarket. Davies slightly spoiled the illusion by adding the helmet and faceguard he wore when using the bonesaw. Well, if you liked your salami REALLY chewy…  
"Time of autopsy 1953hrs, subject Joan Adams, d, o, b 24/10/1997, subject is a Caucasian female found by the police concealed in a dumpster…" He read off the sheet, calmly, softly, his tone neutral. At moments like this she loved him with all of her heart. Sometimes she thought she simply loved him.  
It would be a bad one. She knew that now. Some bodies looked almost peaceful. Some people died in their sleep with an almost beatific smile on their lips. Some were caught in extremes of agony Edward Munch could never hope to capture. Most just looked a little shocked, as though they couldn't comprehend the suddeness, that they were surprised by the reality of their own passing.  
"In a dumpster" she thought. "Like someone thought she was so much trash" Unbelievable  
This one would be bad. She knew that. Somewhere out there were a bunch of hardbitten police officers, many military veterans, some muscle bound body-builders or expert martial artists, all festooned under layers of Kevlar body armour and a huge variety of deadly weapons who were nevertheless wounded and aching beneath their gallows humour and stoic facade. Tonight they would go off duty and drink themselves into a stupor. Or hug their families into mute puzzlement. Or brood until the next smartass punk on the street talked clever to them and found himself wondering why he was scrabbling for his own teeth in the gutter with his shattered fingers.  
Davies gave her the briefest of looks. Ready? it asked.  
Tru gave him the slightest of nods in reply. Lets's do it.  
He unzipped the bag, getting the tip of his latex gloves caught in the teeth as he did so. Tru helped him free it and he gave her a grateful smile. It never ceased to amaze her how a man who was such a klutz could do such delicate work with such precision and skill.  
The smell always got to you first. The acrid reek of faecal matter that seeped through the white gauze of her facemask mixed with the sharp tang of urine. There was no dignity in death, when you died your muscles just gave up, you inevitably soiled yourself. There was another smell too, something metallic mixed with what resembled overripe fruit or vegetables. She realised that was probably exactly what it was, if she'd been found in a dumpster that's what they stank of.  
She cast her mind back to before she had done this for a living. She had never thought of this. In all the films and TV she had watched, the men in the white coats had put the body into a black bag and the detective had got on with the case and she had never given a moments thought as to what happened to it next. Quincy was the only one who spent time with the bodies but he actually argued with his boss or drank at the bar more than did any actual work.  
After a full minute she stopped wincing. The urge to heave would always be there but she buried it deep down inside her.   
She was glad as Davies brought over his instruments, the reassuring aroma of the surgical spirit masking the other smells. Clean, crisp, cool metal contrasted with soft, messy, vulnerable flesh.  
The girls face was frozen. Frozen in a mute scream. But there was something else there to.  
Hopelessness.  
The scream was purely perfunctory, just a reflex action, like a person falling to there death flailing their legs, trying to crawl back up on pure air, knowing it was no good but unable to overcome instinct with reason in their terror.  
She knew no one would hear her. For no one ever had.  
They waited together for a moment in expectation. Waited with their guilty secret in the hope that this frail form in front of them on the table would inexplicably open her eyes and turn to them, ask for help in defiance of all the science they both immersed their lives in. Hoped against hope that the magic that they had now come to accept as everyday would once again allow them to achieve the impossible and turn back time.  
Turn back death.  
It didn't happen.  
He looked at her. She shook her head. Not this time.   
Naked. Her face was grubby, old before it's time. Her hair matted and listless. The scars and bruises covered her body. Welts, still vivid and red all over. Bruises, maybe fingermarks but here and there what looked like a ring mark. Older injuries mixed with the new that told her more than anything that this wasn't some blitz attack but a way of life, that she had known nothing but pain in her entire existence. Now there was no more pain. Now there was just the terrible waste of a life that might have been.  
"A series of bruises all over the upper part of the body…." Davies recorded everything into the tape in the same quiet monotone, noting every injury in turn Tru helped him take pictures of them, easily shifting the dead weight of the body around to allow him access everywhere. Her first touch was tentative. Then it was merely practical, the taboo of touching dead human flesh long since having worn off.  
She was skin and bone, her ribs protruding awkwardly through her pasty, mottled skin. The body felt almost rubbery through the latex of Tru's gloves, like a life jacket ducked in cold water.  
"What appear to be a series of cigarette burns up both arms…"  
"How could they?" Tru thought. "How could anyone?" She wouldn't have done that to the man who killed her mother, the man who had robbed her of the person she loved most in all the world. Not even to him. What sin could this little girl have committed to make anyone think she deserved that?  
Davies' took samples. Hair, skin, blood, nail clippings. Her nails were ragged, broken and discoloured through malnutrition but there was no foreign flesh under them. She hadn't fought.  
She'd given up fighting a long time ago.  
"Appears to be bruising around the vaginal area…" He took intimate samples. He hated it, they both did but it had to be done. Tru forced herself to watch as he swabbed the tiny lips of her labia with a sample tissue on the end of a probe. He held it up under the ultraviolet light and inspected it closely.  
"Appears positive for semen…"  
"SHE'S ONLY SIX!" Tru shouted. She regretted the words as soon as she had uttered them. It wasn't Davies fault, the tragedy of Joan Adams life wasn't his responsibility. The evidence of the monstrous, obscene crime he held in his hands was not of his making. What he was doing gave a chance of justice and retribution against the perpetrator of this dreadful, unnatural act. But she needed to shout. She needed to say something, to voice her outrage, to show whomever was listening that she gave a damn, to give vent to the nauseous agony she felt in her lower stomach, to say that this wasn't right, that this was obscene and she knew it…  
"I've seen younger" Davies sahe whe words without any hint of patronisation, without any bravado. He wasn't being condescending, he was just giving voice to his own pain. It worked. Tru forgot hers' knowing his was worse. She went from self-pity to sympathy in a nanosecond.  
She reached out and touched his forearm. It struck her this was the most physically intimate they'd ever been together.  
"You know…" he began.  
"I'll stay" she cut him off. "Because I have to see this through" she added in her mind "And because I don't want you to have to go through this alone"  
She took the forceps and opened the lips of the vagina allowing him to probe inside with a new swab. It struck it that this was all the sexual experience she'd ever know. She would never grow to adolescence, never know those first tentative stirrings of attraction to another, the uncertain sweetness of the first kiss and embrace from a school sweetheart. Never be an adult and know the passionate fury of a lover's touch. Never know the miracle of giving life to another from within her and cradle that baby in her arms, knowing absolute love and feeling it returned in kind.  
This was all she'd ever know. Only pain and terror.  
They repeated the process with the anus and mouth.  
All positive.  
They packaged the positive samples in separate evidence tubes to avoid cross-contamination. More than one rapist or murderer had escaped conviction due to poor evidential procedures. Each would be submitted to police forensics lab for comparison with DNA samples from suspects and the national DNA database.  
"Dear god please let it be a stranger" she prayed, "Please not a family member, please". She hadn't been to church in a long time but she understood entirely why people embraced the concept in extremis. You had to believe in something more when the material world was so ugly. How she hoped it was a stranger, that that last bond of familial trust remained unbroken, one last vestige of love intact.  
He checked the nose taking a skin sample from each nostril. "Lack of nose hair suggests possible narcotic abuse, we'll have to wait for the blood tests to be certain"  
She wanted to protest again but this time bit her tongue. "Thank you Meredith" she thought closing her eyes. "Thank you for being so, so, strong and raising Harrison and I as you did, it must have been so hard when you were falling apart inside yourself. No wonder you turned to drugs, you fell because you'd spent so much effort in making sure we didn't". She would phone her tonight, her and Harrison. She needed to, needed to hear their voices, to feel the way she always did when she spoke to them.  
Did Joan Adams have a family, she wondered? Did she have a brother or sister, a mother and father? Surely someone, somewhere must have held in their arms and loved her, just once.  
Just once.  
They finished packaging. Davies walked over and got them both a cup of water from the cooler. They stood together and sipped quietly.  
"What's the worst you ever saw?" she regretted the words the moment they were out of her mouth but the question was bubbling up inside her until she felt it would make her burst. She wanted him to say this was it, that there had never been anything worse. But she suspected that wasn't the case.  
Davies took a moment. He wasn't searching for the answer, he knew the answer. He was just wondering how to say it.  
"The Great Dane"  
"A dog?" she almost laughed.  
He nodded "The police let the vet kill the dog but didn't think it was fair to let him cut it open. So I did"  
"Why?" she was genuinely baffled.  
"I had to reassemble the baby…."  
She felt the tears well up in her eyes. He was in her arms before she shed them. They stayed there together for a long time.  
"The detective who stayed with me quit the force. I met him again at the trial, he sells insurance now"  
"Good" she felt him nod in agreement.  
"We should get on"  
He sliced through the skin. It was like pastry, leathery, almost translucent pastry. He sawed through the bones of the ribcage and split it open with a crack that echoed around the room. Some bone fragments showered over his visor and she wiped them off for him with a tissue. People always said children's bones reminded them of kindling but Tru never thought that. It always reminded her of icing, thick, thick icing like that which you'd find on top of a wedding cake, but springy, more malleable.  
He cut through the internal organs, snipping through arteries and blood vessels, neatly cutting around fat and cartilage as though he was a gardener pruning a hedge. Tru removed each in turn, weighed them and took minute samples of tissues which she packaged for the lab. You had to be careful, Islam and some branches of Judaism and Christian sects were vehemently opposed to anything being removed from the body before burial. She wondered if Joan Adams had any sort of religion, wondered if she was old enough to comprehend the concept of god or an afterlife. Wondered if she was with him now?  
What sort of funeral would she have? Who would go? Maybe, she wouldn't be alone, maybe some of those people who had failed her in life would turn up for the camera's in death. Politicians, journalists, social workers, community leaders. They might make pretty speeches and well-intentioned promises. And mean them. But you couldn't save everyone. Tomorrow there would be a new front page, a new area of concern for the populace. The problem with people was they were only human.  
She didn't look human. Not anymore. They never did. Tru was unsure of soul or anything of the sort, even after the inexplicable events of the last few months but whatever it was, that spark, that trace of life, once it was gone they never looked human any more. They looked like waxworks, waxworks with a gaping hole in the centre that had been scraped out, the flesh peeled back and held open by various clamps and retractors scattered around the raw aperture fashioned in human viscera. The stainless steel surface of the autopsy table was covered in a thick layer of blood like some rich claret based sauce. It reminded her for all the world of preparing a Sunday roast. The body paled even more as it drained from her.  
She didn't look like a waxwork anymore. She was so small she looked like a little china doll.  
The lungs bubbled up a black liquid as she handled them. She'd lived with a smoker. The person who had burnt her arms? She wondered if all those poets and songwriters who spoke of holding someone's heart in their hands had ever done it for real. It was no big thrill, they just felt spongy, nothing more. The blood didn't smell that bad, a little bitter maybe, it reminded her of when she'd used to have nosebleeds as a kid.  
When they were finished Tru took the organs and placed them in a bright yellow medical waste bag. She placed it back into the opening and Davies sewed it up. Sometimes he let her practice her stitching, not in the invasive procedures because that was evidential and she wasn't qualified but no one cared about the closing. Someday she might still be a doctor, she needed the experience. She'd always dreamed about holding back death, she just never imagined she'd do it in quite this way. She could never help but think of Mrs Anderson, her sewing teacher at school. She gave an involuntary shiver at the recollection of the sensation of the cane cracking off her bare hips. Well, she'd be happy enough now, Tru could sew with the best of them.  
Not today though, today he'd do everything himself.  
It always made her laugh watching TV and movies where the coroner carefully restored all the pieces into their proper place. In reality you slung them into the bag and just put it away. No one cared what was inside and organs from a suspicious death were never used in transplants. She might believe in the supernatural but she didn't believe in vampires. Any unexplained death would have the heart cut out as a matter of routine.  
They took another break, sipping water, not speaking, lost in their own thoughts.  
They moved on to the head. Davies cut it open as though it were a coconut. The top of the skull fell onto the table surface like a plate and rocked back and forth for a few seconds like a spinning plate until Tru grabbed and steadied it, smearing some cerebral fluid on her arm. She wiped it off as Davies inspected the dull grey putty like substance of her brain, checking for lesions or visible damage. They took more minute samples, tiny slivers to mount on a microscope slide.  
"Was she clever?" Tru wondered. What gifts did she have for the world that it would now be denied? Maybe she wasn't, maybe she would just be an ordinary person with no special talents or abilities. Maybe she'd have worked at McDonalds or cleaned floors somewhere. But someone would have loved her.  
He reattached the scalp, fine, fine stitching, virtually invisible. A little makeup from the mortician and you would never be able to tell.  
They closed her eyes, one each after examining them for any telltale signs of haemoraghing. Little, blank blue marbles, drained of life and hope and everything else.  
"That's it" Davies announced.  
"What do you think killed her?" Tru asked as they began to strip off their protective gear.  
"Hard to say, could…"  
"The short version" her look told him.  
"I think she just gave up"  
She nodded in agreement. They transferred her to the body storage unit, ready to slide her into her own tiny tomb. Even it looked too big for her. They stood there for a second in silence.  
"Davies can you give me a minute alone with her?"  
He didn't question. Didn't try to stop her. He just turned and walked away. She never ceased to be surprised at the depth and subtlety of this remarkable man who had entered her life.  
She leaned over the body and cleared the few strands of hair that lingered over Joan's forehead until it was clear, brushing it backwards in an affectionate gesture. She leaned down and planted a soft, soft kiss on her cold flesh. She leaned close, whispering her words in the echoing stillness of the morgue.  
"I don't know if you can hear me. I want you to know it's ok now, everything's ok. You don't have to be afraid anymore. I'm with you now. You don't have to be brave, you've been brave for long enough. Maybe you're in a better place and if you are that's ok. But if you want to know life again, if you want to see how beautiful and wonderful it can be, I want you to open your eyes and speak to me. That's all you have to do, just say the words, I'll do everything else. I promise, it can be better, it can be so, so much better"  
She waited. She had no idea for how long she waited. But Joan didn't move. She just lay there on the slab, still and cold. Her time was over.  
"WAKE UP!" Tru screamed at her, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her, "WAKE UP, BABY! WAKE UP!". Her head lolled about her shoulders grotesquely. Tru both heard and felt the stitches in her chest ripping. Instinctively she let her go, the cadaver falling limply back on the metal tray with an audible clang, Tru cringing as she cowered away, her hands held to her mouth in guilt. Guilt for committing one more act of violence against this tiny frail form that had seen so much.  
She reached out and gently readjusted the body back into a peaceful pose.  
"Please baby" she whispered. "Please wake up, for me. Wake up"  
She lay still.  
Resignedly Tru went to shut the steel door on her .  
She opened her eyes.  
She turned her head.  
She spoke the words.  
"Tru, help me!"  
"That's my girl!" Tru sobbed, her tears just having enough time to strike Joan's cheeks before the day rewound.


End file.
